Utah Exhibition Reviews published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including reviews of local Utah artists, regional artists, group exhibitions and traveling exhibits of national and international artists.
A muse is what the ancient Greeks called it: the voice that inspires the artist. The Celts had Brigid. For the Christian artist, there’s the Holy Spirit. The Hindus have Saraswati. For Scotty Mitchell, the voices speaking to her came from an entire menagerie. “One morning, while drinking […]
In 1986, I toured a pair of museums on Trafalgar Square in London: the National Gallery, possibly the finest collection in an international field marked by many superb contenders, and the National Portrait Gallery, where I encountered a modern portrait that came to haunt me over the years. […]
You may already be familiar with McKay Lenker Bayer, or at least with her creative mind. She’s the one who decided you should get on your hands and knees with a magnifying glass to look at really small versions of art. What began as a class assignment, and […]
Shiya Zeng exhibits unfamiliar magic around the perimeter of what I like to call the Sunset Gallery, at Finch Lane. Then, to show just how magical it is, she contrasts it with a relatively mundane counterpoint that appears to restore her audience to Salt Lake City, though to […]
At the Springville Art Museum’s 2023 Spiritual and Religious Art of Utah exhibition, among the hundreds of excellent works that found their way into what must be one of the largest exhibitions of recent art anywhere, one piece that stood out was by an artist unknown to me. […]
If the only John Wood painting in the gallery was “Shared Experience,” a casual viewer could be excused for thinking him a landscape painter in the Impressionist School. This panel, which is almost twice as wide as it is tall, seems to show a body of water, a […]
The five sculptures and one video that constitute Parable Bodies, the exhibition by Moses Williams now in the AIR Space at UMOCA, simulate living things using materials that are not alive, such as earth and light. That could be said of most art, of course: but it’s not […]
The film is set in the quintessential American space: the interior of an automobile. Marlene Kos is seen sitting on the passenger side of the front seat (the “suicide” seat), while the camera views her from behind. This brings to mind “Jo in Wyoming,” a painting by Edward […]
The view is straight down, so that the desert hillocks and washes look like an abstract painting, all contours and curves on a completely flat canvas. Then the view rotates, the viewer seeming to circle down, around the focal point, moving from above the spot to looking at […]
If Afrofuturism’s purpose is to imagine new futures and rewrite past narratives, Chelle Barbour’s collage portraits embrace a surrealist approach to keep those narratives open, vibrant and strange. An exhibition at Ephraim’s Granary Arts, featuring scores of works by the LA-based artist, creates an artistic dialogue that does […]
The casual visitor to Ogden Contemporary Art Center’s current exhibit—the passerby or art aficionado who stops in on any given weekday—will miss an important aspect of Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño’s work. It’s the lived experience, the performative aspect—the various healing ceremonies that undergrid the artist’s practice and were […]
On first sight, the painting rings like a chime that echoes through the memory of art. The presence nearby of two more works from the same time and place confirms that the painter surely knew of and appreciated the great Mexican muralists, including Diego Rivera (once Mexico’s foremost […]
“It’s not as if they’ll have any Goya, or Velázquez,” the couple remarked, chuckling, as they entered the museum. They were at Brigham Young University to view the Museum of Art’s widely-publicized, widely-anticipated blockbuster event of the year, Spain and the Hispanic World—an exhibition billed as hosting “treasures […]
“Apologia” is a technical term that, while related to “apology,” actually means “explanation.” The connection is historical, since an explanation functions like an apology, in clarifying why something is different from what’s expected. On her website, Rebecca Klundt offers an elaborate “apologia” for her work, which she puckishly […]
Given so many bad stories and ill-will in our national conversation these days, it’s easy to overlook those artists who still want to share their by-no-means-universal appreciation, and even gratitude, for the positive works they witness and the good lives they enjoy, but do not presume to feel […]
A stroll to FICE Gallery and Boutique offers the observant visitor a live experience of historical Utah, albeit not so much the “Wild West” of fantasy as the gritty, urban jungle of black-and-white Noir films from the 1930s. This downtown neighborhood is a rare survivor of a lost […]
The wind was howling, but people were talking about the art, not the weather, at Maureen O’Hara Ure’s packed opening on Friday evening at Phillips, her longtime gallery, where she’s presenting the second set of mixed-media panels she began with on-site sketches while traveling through Spain in 2022 […]
The paintings Linnie Brown is currently showing at ‘A’ Gallery bring to mind transparency as a visual fact, but also as a concept. Her layered images more than anything recall the cinematic lap dissolve, in which as one scene fades out, instead of the screen going dark, then […]
The picnic table anchors this installation. It grounds the floating veils and sky-yearning columns that dominate the space, suggesting a narrative without ever explicitly revealing it. In this large-scale, site-specific installation, Gail Grinnell has transformed Weber State University’s Shaw Gallery into a reflective space that resonates with the […]
